Cleopatra 2525-Volume 3 (2000)

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General		Extras
Category	Science Fiction	Main Menu Audio & Animation
Rating
Year Of Production	2000
Running Time	88:10 (Case: 86)
RSDL / Flipper	No/No	Cast & Crew
Start Up	Menu
Region Coding	1,2,3,4,5,6	Directed By	Rick Jacobson John Laing Wayne Rose T.J. Scott
Studio Distributor	Beyond Home Entertainment	Starring	Gina Torres Victoria Pratt Jennifer Sky Patrick Kake David Press Mark Williams Elizabeth Hawthorne Rupert Cocks
Case	Amaray-Transparent-Secure Clip
RPI	?	Music	Joseph LoDuca

    Here we have the third disc in the first box set of Cleopatra 2525. It never ceases to amaze me which shows make it in the states and which get cut. Whilst this is just a fun little piece of science fiction, it is light years ahead of some of the rubbish that seems to pour out of the US season after season.

1.9:Perceptions (22:02)

    A secret research lab is under attack, a deadly effective attack. The three girls are dispatched to the area to see what is going on. When they first arrive it would appear that nothing is happening but a strange apparition appears and directs them to the location of the trouble. The apparition appears to be the ghost of Helen's father. The team splits three ways. Sarge is given the job of getting into the secret lab where a device has gone into overload and will blow up and kill them all. This device is spitting laser beams at random intervals, requiring Sarge to perform multiple gymnastics to get close. Helen is off on a quest of her own and Cleopatra is getting the survivors out. A nice little twist again raises this episode out of the ordinary.

2.0 Trail and Error (22:04)

    Inhibitor girl, the one with the mind powers, is back in action. This time, two betrayers turn up at the detention centre with the intention of taking her off to be studied. Our intrepid girls arrive on the scene just as mind girl uses her powers on the betrayers, and as she is distracted Cleo shoves the mind inhibitor back on her head. Voice is fascinated by the ability of the girl to control betrayers and wonders if she can control the Baileys (the large robotic things that have taken over the Earth). Voice sends Helen and Sarge out with the girl to experiment on the surface, but first she takes the precaution of loading the girl with an injectable remote controlled explosive and giving Cleo the destruct switch. A slightly disappointing ending winds up a reasonable episode.

2.1 Double (22:04)

Cleo walks into a bar (no this is not a joke) surprising Helen and Sarge as they are already in the bar with Cleo. Turns out that when the Baileys had Cleo in their grasp they made more than one copy. One of the two Cleos is not whom she appears to be, but is a betrayer, and working out which is which is going to be a problem. To complicate things, another female betrayer is on one of the Cleo's tail with destruction in mind. Even when they work out which Cleo is which, things get even more complicated as it appears that Cleo the betrayer is not yet fully programmed and is actually a really nice person.

2.2 Last Stand (22:00)

Cleo earns her first gauntlet, the things on the girls arms that hold the weaponry and elastic bungy cords and so on. Not a full gauntlet, just a limited one with enough parts to be used in the story later on. A disturbance in a sector and a call for help from a hero mercenary gets the girls into the action. The hero is a guy that runs around the warrens doing good deeds. He has met Sarge before. Apparently she used to be a bad girl and was shot by him a long time ago. Of course, since then she has admired him greatly. He is currently trying to stop a group of bad guys from getting their hands on an old cache of atomic weaponry All they have to do is hold off the bad guys long enough for the technician to repair the shield (guess where he gets the parts from?) and they can all go home. Unfortunately for the team, not all is what it seems and they end up in more than a little trouble.

Video

    The transfer is presented at 1.33:1 and is not 16x9 enhanced.

    Sharpness is again an inverse function of the speed of either the object movement or the camera pan speed. Still objects are quite sharp, but moving objects degrade quickly to blurs. Shadow detail varies but is not too bad, and there is some low level noise present.

    The colours are well saturated but are also affected by the lack of sharpness in moving objects and the blocking that is present along with the posterization.

    MPEG artefacts are present in many scenes such as in the first episode at 0:59, along with some very strange artefacts affecting the entire screen at 11:07. Some really bad blocking can be seen at 4:04. Posterization is present in the faces of the actors, such as at 0:56. There are no real problems with film artefacts.

    There are no subtitles on this single layered disc.

Video Ratings Summary

Sharpness
Shadow Detail
Colour
Grain/Pixelization
Film-To-Video Artefacts
Film Artefacts
Overall

Audio

    Unfortunately, dialogue quality has slipped slightly with the distortion that was present in the first disc returning. You can still understand what is being said but it is annoying.

    The modern music continues to bounce along. I did not pick up any musical references in the soundtrack this time.

    The surrounds worked at times with some ambience and the occasional effect but nothing spectacular.

    The subwoofer supported the soundtrack but missed many opportunities during explosions and so on.

Audio Ratings Summary

Dialogue
Audio Sync
Clicks/Pops/Dropouts
Surround Channel Use
Subwoofer
Overall

Menu

    I loved the couple of little twists that they managed to work into the storylines in a couple of these episodes. I was a little disappointed with the ending of Episode 2.0, but each to his own.

    The video is disappointing.

    The audio has also slid back a notch.

    There are no extras.

Video
Audio
Extras
Plot
Overall